How much should a UFC pay-per-view cost? Say, for the sake of argument, that it’s a pretty good one. Not spectacular, but not the bottom of the barrel either. What’s a fair price for a full evening’s worth of high-level fight sports?
Turns out that fans might not be the only ones asking this question. During Thursday’s quarterly financial call, TKO Group Holdings president Mark Shapiro discussed some of the parent company’s concerns with ESPN’s pricing of UFC pay-per-view events.
“ESPN and Disney were very aggressive, if you will, on pricing the pay-per-views and they have full control over that,” Shapiro said. “But they have control given what they’re paying us for those rights. Over the period of our partnership, they probably went a little quicker and a little higher than we would have liked.”
In other words, it wasn’t the UFC’s idea to increase the price of pay-per-views from $59.99 in 2018 to $79.99 today. And, according to Shapiro, the UFC’s parent company suspects that the rapid increase in cost to the consumer is why “piracy numbers really jacked up” for UFC pay-per-views recently.
The UFC’s war with online pirates has been a long and not terribly effective one. While UFC president Dana White has occasionally made bold and antagonistic claims about targeting illegal streaming sites, there’s little evidence that he was actually doing all the things he said he was.
Pirated streams still exist for every UFC event. When surveyed, many longtime fans of the sport will tell you that they never or very seldom pay for UFC pay-per-views. The UFC has been aggressive about getting fight videos removed from YouTube and social media sites, but if you’re looking around social media for clips of finishes or sometimes even whole fights just moments after they’ve ended, you can still find them very easily.
The pirates still sail with impunity. They may even be thriving. Years of attempts to rein them in, going all the way back to former UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta’s testimony before Congress on the subject in 2009, have done almost nothing to stop it. So now what?
If you talk to anti-piracy experts, they’ll tell you that price is the No. 1 factor in online piracy. Here, the UFC faces an issue on several fronts. Not only has ESPN increased the cost of each pay-per-view by roughly one-third over the past six years, it’s also more than doubled the price of the ESPN+ subscription, which is required to even have the option of purchasing a UFC pay-per-view in the U.S.
It also doesn’t help that many fans have reported issues with ESPN+ on the technical side. Last month’s UFC 304 pay-per-view was interrupted by a seemingly years-old graphic of Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, for no apparent reason. ESPN+ streams have also been known to go mute or freeze or simply turn into a blank, black screen, sometimes at important moments during fights.
All of this seems especially relevant now that the UFC is nearing the end of its broadcast rights deal with ESPN. Companies like Netflix and Amazon have shown increased interest in streaming live sports. White has teased the possibility that the UFC might break up its product across multiple streaming platforms, similar to the NFL’s model.
Depending on the cost and accessibility of those platforms, it might not be such a dramatic shift from the current model. Clearly, the UFC already offers several different tiers of its product.
At the top is the pay-per-views, where fans are asked to pay nearly $100 a month (when the ESPN+ subscription is factored in) for title fights and marquee attractions. Then there are the UFC Fight Night events, which tend to fall into two categories: decent and disposable.
An example of the former is last Saturday’s UFC on ABC event in Abu Dhabi. It featured some known names like Umar Nurmagomedov and Cory Sandhagen, and took place in an actual arena with a full crowd. For an example of the other type of Fight Night event, however, you only need to look as far as this Saturday’s offering. It’s headlined by a heavyweight rematch no one asked for, live from what is essentially a UFC-owned warehouse with a small, tepid crowd.
Under the current deal, the UFC has no real incentive to offer anything better or more appealing to fans than that. It gets paid simply to put on these events, regardless of whether people watch them. It is pure content-production. Even the UFC president doesn’t bother to show up for all these events.
This is a problem, but maybe also an opportunity. If the UFC is going to offer multiple versions of its product, ranging widely in quality, it’s not hard to imagine a world where these iterations are spread out across multiple platforms.
Here’s where it gets tricky, though. The fighters who bring the starpower to make UFC pay-per-views special? They have to start somewhere. They have to gradually gain that fan following that eventually justifies charging premium prices to see them perform.
And if people tune out from the lower tiers of the UFC product, how will they find out who matters and why? How convoluted can you make the pipeline from novice to contender to champion before too much of your audience leaks out along the way?
This is the question the UFC and its parent company will have to answer in the upcoming round of broadcast rights negotiations. And getting it right without squeezing the fan base past the breaking point could be trickier than they think.
